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Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?

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Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?

#51

Post by throwaway38375 »

4lun wrote: post #17
throwaway38375 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only exception I have to this is S3. There are so many S3 compatible providers that I don't see any problem with using S3. There's even MinIO for self hosting and local development! Some more suggestions for open source components: Redis for caching and queueing SMTP for mail Nginx for load balancing Cron for scheduling

> The only exception I have to this is S3. There are so many S3 compatible providers that I don't see any problem with using S3. I've strongly held this view in the past but after recently being on a project where we trialed using other providers, there's a lot missing compared to the AWS S3 offering that has made me rethink this stance a bit Permissions being a big one, many providers offer little to no fine grained…

A fair point. :)

Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?

#52

Post by rgrmrts »

edtech_dev wrote: post #43
rgrmrts wrote: post #24

https://fly.io and https://vultr.com I used Fly as a modern successor to Heroku (I know Heroku is still around). Features are good, scaling to 0 is great, their networking stuff is solid, and pricing is fair. I generally use it to host application backends. Vultr for when I want a long lived server or build my own infrastructure platforms. I use it as just a VPS provider for larger machines at reasonable costs. Cavea…

Thanks. I hadn't heard about vultr. How does it compare to Hetzner and Linode?

It’s similar. I liked Hetzner for their affordable bare-metal offerings, but found their interfaces to be fairly clunky. Linode and Vultr (and Digital Ocean) have a nicer web based interface. I think you can find benchmarks online comparing performance of the different VPS providers but IMO the differences are not all that relevant for every day use cases.

It mostly boils down to which service you like more based on entirely subjective variables like company, branding, ownership (Linode was acquired by Akamai).

Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?

#53

Post by atmosx »

mekster wrote: post #38
atmosx wrote: post #33

You most likely are going to need more services like cloud object storage and a managed DB. Running all these services by yourself will be hard and should be avoided unless necessary (e.g. compliance). DigitalOcean is okay-ish although, I don’t feel like their services can handle high amounts of traffic. Their offering is rather complete though as they have an object store with free CDN support, managed DBs, managed…

How is running a database hard? It is more annoying to receive alerts from AWS of expiring certificates and suddenly they start charging for extended support when the version goes EOL on their definition and having have to deal with them. At least by running stuff yourself, you gain universal knowledge that lasts as long as you're using that software but learning the way of AWS is a complete waste if you ever leave t…

You're barking at the wrong tree :-)

Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?

#54

Post by serguzest »

edtech_dev wrote: post #49
serguzest wrote: post #32

My latest `serverfull` deployment: ܁ DigitalOcean droplet(s) with Docker service preinstalled. ܁ All services are running with docker-compose. ܁ Managed Postgresql and spaces for storage. ܁ Cloudflare free tier and their `tunnel` product as a reverse proxy into your docker-compose network is super useful. ܁ Github actions and container registry to compile and sync container images. We have staging/production environm…

Thanks. I have only recently become aware of the Cloudfare tunnels. What's your use case for running them exactly?

you can run a tunnel client on any server and as long as the server has outbound internet access, you can publicly access this server via Cloudflare controlled domain. You can also have standard CloudFlare perks in this way such as CDN and rewrite rules. You don't need to have a reverse proxy server, no need to rely on static IPs or inbound firewall rules in the data center. So you can freely create and destroy droplets they can have different IPs each time.

Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?

#55

Post by logotype »

mekster wrote: post #39
logotype wrote: post #34

My old trusty Dell PowerEdge R720 in the utility room at home. It works fine, and powers everything from web hosting to locally running LLM's. It would have costed a fortune running the equivalent compute capacity in any of the big 3.

How do you handle hardware failures or screw ups for the server to go offline? When I saw one of my server not coming back up at home for some reason on a reboot, I realized I needed spare hardware to reliably operate them. I can't let it stay offline while I order for the spare parts to arrive, even though I have backup data ready elsewhere to be restored. Agree that cloud is too expensive these days. When you reali…

Uptime for the last 3 years has been >99%. 1. Keep spares (esp. fans and drives). Hot swap if needed. 2. Dual ISP (1Gbit/s primary, auto switch to Starlink if primary link fails). 3. Keep a separate server for testing. Actually I lied, I test things in prod, sue me.

The monthly AWS bill is roughly 5 USD and consists of Route53 only!

Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?

#56

Post by __d »

mekster wrote: post #37
__d wrote: post #5

I've used Digital Ocean for nearly 10 years. It's been good. That said: I don't know enough about your situation, but ... what are you optimizing for? AWS/GCP/Azure have each got a platform that provides a heap of functionality. Using that will save you time-to-delivery and engineer-hours. All the clouds have startup programs that will mean it's basically free until you get some traction. If you're looking for invest…

Don't underestimate the downside of using those "heaps of services". It was funny to see someone using RDS and was warned of expiring CA certificate and AWS suddenly charging for extended support because the version they were using went out of support period. I laughed how they were supposed to just install MySQL locally and avoided all that. If you wanted point in time recovery, just read the doc for an hour and do…

It sounds like the OP has made their decision, and wants to avoid "the big three", so this is likely a moot point. But ...

Dependencies are always a trade-off. Be they code libraries/modules, programming languages, network protocols, services, etc, any dependency has the benefit of giving you something you'd otherwise have to implement yourself with the downside of then being tied to their schedule, quality, license, pricing, lock-in, etc.

In your RDS example, a similar problem might be a self-hosted database that has an urgent security update. If you're using a cloud provider, that's just taken care of without you even seeing any downtime. When self-hosted, that's a software upgrade, with all the attendant concerns about backwards compatibility, making sure you coordinate the replica upgrades, etc, etc. In both cases, ignoring the issue has costs (one financial, the other security).

In implementing a system, it's your task to balance these tradeoffs. In an investment-funded startup, often the evaluation of the costs and benefits is a little different to what it might be for a bootstrapped startup or an ongoing business. With a limited runway and resources, leveraging the work of others can be a lot more attractive.

Free plans do tend to make expanding your set of dependencies very easy, and cloud-based infrastructure is certainly expensive when compared to the direct costs of self-hosting. But it's there now, and will be there with no ongoing effort on your part. Sometimes, that's worth the cost for the time to market.

All that said: this isn't an either/or. Digital Ocean has a bunch of services that you might choose to use too, and they're not "the big three".

Re: Ask HN: Those of you who don't use AWS/Azure/GCP, what do you use for hosting?

#57

Post by mekster »

atmosx wrote: post #53
mekster wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is running a database hard? It is more annoying to receive alerts from AWS of expiring certificates and suddenly they start charging for extended support when the version goes EOL on their definition and having have to deal with them. At least by running stuff yourself, you gain universal knowledge that lasts as long as you're using that software but learning the way of AWS is a complete waste if you ever leave t…

You're barking at the wrong tree :-)

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